It's finished! As I mentioned way back in November, I had committed to the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon, a historic triathlon that involves jumping off a boat into the San Francisco Bay, swimming to the city, biking around a bit and then running around a bit.

The swim is really the most significant aspect of the triathlon and it's the one I prepared the most for. Preparation started in ernest at the end of 2014 and my motivation really kicked in after my cousin Rita told me more or less that I was an idiot for attempting to swim a distance on my injured shoulder. If there's anything that I hate more than anything, it's being told I can't do something - so this really helped :).

The day of the event began at 3:20 am with a hastily consumed bowl of Trader Joe's granola decorated with a severely overripened banana. The banana was potentially a mistake because I immediately felt nauseous. At 3:35, dad and I were on the road to San Francisco. My phone battery was at 14% because, in the age of technological progress, it was deemed wise to manufacture a USB cable so thin that it could feasibly be plugged in upside down and the user would be none the wiser.

Thankfully it lasted long enough for us to reach San Francisco and at that point I reassembled my bike, gave my dad the phone with 6% of battery remaining and wished him luck with navigating to a parking spot. (He ended up finding parking near by and attempted to nap for a couple of hours.)

Arriving at the transition area at 4:15am, there was already a long line of riders waiting to enter. A female triathlete in a foul mood asked a volunteer why it was necessary for them to queue at this time. He shrugged and said he didn't know, as she rushed away to the end of the line. Another triathlete jumped in and said to the volunteer, "thank you, by the way, for giving up your time to be here."

Once in, I was very happy with my position at the end of the rack. An officious looking woman observed me laying out my towel underneath my bike and insisted that I make sure I didn't extend out too far outside of the rack. Given that my towel was perhaps 30 centimetres in width and the adjacent walkway was several metres wide, I could only laugh.

By the time I racked up, it was 4:30 am and I decided that it was probably wiser to use a porta-toilet before donning my wetsuit, for the obvious convenience. At this time there was already a substantial queue and so I was forced to take the first stall that was available, a structure that lacked the most basic stability from the outside and gave me the very real sensation while inside that I was about to re-enact that scene from Family Guy where Peter's porta-toilet falls over. Euch.

At 4:50am, the line for the bike pump was about 50 athletes deep. Meanwhile, outside, the line to get into the transition area had a couple of hundred athletes in it. While I was initially miffed at the early start to the event, it turns out to have been A Good Idea.

One of the best things about arriving so ridiculously early was that I got to make several acquaintances from around the world. In particular, there was the British woman who had flown in from New Zealand, the British man who had flown in from Toronto, the Rice university student who was the sole competitive triathlete in their club, the French man who was here for a second time and the German man who was a professional triathlete.

I got to the boat at just after 5am and gave up everything that I didn't need for the swim (including my glasses) and found a comfortable spot on the carpet next to a fence they had erected a few feet from the starboard windows to stop the boat getting unbalanced as people jumped off. Later, after I remarked that the carpet was actually fairly comfortable, the German pro mentioned I should notice how the carpet is wet as we leave. That, apparently, is from triathletes who don't wish to queue for the limited toilets on the boat. Euch.

Speaking of the limited toilets, one of the few possessions I had with me that I wasn't swimming with was a water bottle. Staying hydrated is important and I finished that bottle fairly quickly. However, now snugly wrapped up in a wetsuit, it made visits to the facilities somewhat tedious. The first was okay, given enough space in a stall, but the second and third involved significant queueing and some careful balance (I'm adamant my wetsuit will be exposed mostly to water).

1.5 hours later, we were close to departing. I felt like a nap. The adrenaline from waking up at 3:15am had mostly worn off. There wasn't, however, any space to lie down. Walking to the bathrooms involved hopping into tiny triangles in between excited triathletes. It would have been nice to do the Escape with a friend.

The boat departed at 6:34. There was much cheering. I was nervous.

At just after 7, we completed a circuit of the Alcatraz island. Athletes were stretching on the balcony. The queue for the bathroom was the entire length of the boat.

As it approached 7:30, the American national anthem played. I started an activity on my watch. It was searching for a GPS signal.

At 7:30, triathletes clustered at each end of the starboard side, where there were two openings in the rails. The fog horn rang. A loud cheer erupted, simultaneously with the almost non-stop sound of beeping as athletes walked over the timing mats and jumped off the boat. I made my way towards the exit at the back of the starboard side.

I walked over the timing mat. It beeped, many times, as others also walked over. There was little time to think, I wanted to walk straight off but ended up walking to the right to find a gap in the row of people jumping off. My watch was still searching for a GPS signal.

The water wasn't actually that cold. And the waves, they weren't that bad. I was disappointed. My competitive advantage was partially in the fact that I'd trained for the intensity of the Alcatraz swim, but the water that day, it was flat. The fastest swimmers apparently finished in 25 minutes or so. I took 40 minutes.

Unlike the HITS Napa triathlon I did, where I had elbows and feet hitting me from all angles, I only got hit a couple of times by other swimmers. One of those swimmers was going the wrong way, so I kept swimming into him. He continued trying to cross my path but I swore under my breath and kept going. He eventually gave up. I like to think I saved him some energy.

Swimming the Bay with 2,000 other swimmers was unlike anything I've ever done before. I felt like I was in a school of triathletes, each mostly swimming autonomously yet collectively we were all going the same way and helping each other navigate that way. Swimming in open water is so unlike anything else - there's nothing quite as expansive and as uniform as the surface of the sea.

After a while (well, 40 minutes), I arrived at the shore. I had left a shirt and a pair of shoes in a bag which was left out there. A volunteer helped me pull my wetsuit off. The shoes and shirt went on, and I overtook a number of people trying to run the half a mile to the bike racks in their wetsuits. Heh.

Bike shoes on, a run out to the mount point and I was off. The wind was at my back. I overtook a number of triathletes struggling to get up to speed on the flat. The hills came quickly enough, though, and I slowed down. Ostensibly, I was preserving energy for the run.

The bike course for the Escape is lovely, a hilly course around San Francisco with some lovely corners. That morning was foggy and descending into the fog on the return trip was much fun. I was adventurous, undeterred by the sight of an athlete who wrecked going down one of the downhills and who was now covered in blood and strapped to a body board being loaded into an ambulance. Out of towners struggle with the hills, particularly if they insist on using tri bikes.

There was a pungent smell emanating from my brake pads after a couple of the downhills. I'm glad I updated them a few weeks ago, they made the corners much more enjoyable.

While in Golden Gate Park, I made friends with a bearded, tattooed chap with a great shorts/jersey combination which were covered in flame graphics. These matched his tattoos well. I commented on this and we had a lovely conversation about Pittsburgh, from which he traveled.

The end of the bike was sad, for me, because running is mostly just pain. I put my new running shoes on and ran out. There's nothing sadder than a runner wearing cycling lycra but I'm too cheap to buy a tri-suit and too Indian to fit well within my cycling lycra.

On my way out, I overheard my dad directing my roommate Ryan to his location and was amused. My friend Alberto, an impressive triathlete who was there as a supporter, yelled "Go Sunil!". I smiled. A few metres later, a lady burst into laughter and commented, "what a great smile!".

The run was slow from the beginning. I was quickly overtaken by many of the athletes I had overtaken earlier while cycling. Still, I enjoyed the scenery and was the subject of a couple of comments, "You've traveled a long way from Cambridge!". One of these was from another 27 year old called Rob, with whom I confided that I was too cheap to buy a new jersey. We had a surprisingly in-depth conversation about why there are so many fast 40 year old triathletes and so few late twenty-somethings. He was faster at running than I was, so I bade him goodbye and continued on.

The finish to the triathlon was odd. You run past people who've already finished and families doing ordinary things. You can taste the end but you're not there yet. There's a good few hundred yards of grass to run through. The grass was slippery and my balance was suspicious. I didn't trip though.

Running through the inflatable finish gate, I was happy that it was over, that I finished. Also, a little underwhelmed. I'd expected that at the end of this accomplishment, my legs would be full of lactic acid, or I'd be ravenous, or faint. I felt fine. Perhaps I should have run faster ;-).

I had an assortment of friends and my dad waiting for me at the finish line. Actually, that's something of a lie, most of my friends arrived a minute after I finished because apparently my time prediction was perhaps a little too accurate - but they were there and that was wonderful! Thank you!

The hardest aspect of becoming a triathlete for any sort of event longer than a sprint distance triathlon is figuring out how to manage your time. The last six months or so have been an endless battle between my social obligations (mostly voluntary, mind you) and this underlying fear that I wasn't training enough. Well, it turns out that less is more - at first I overtrained and I was hellishly tired at work. Then I started training less, sleeping more and suddenly started breaking PRs on Strava.

The momentum is addictive and it'll probably carry me through to a half Ironman distance triathlon in September. My next challenge has already been set though - in March 2016, Phil and I will be participating in the Cape Epic, a notorious mountain bike race described as "the Tour de France of mountain biking".

The BART (less the people and more the system) screwed me and a few thousand other passengers overnight when the holy trinity of delay-causing events coincided to result in hour long delays trying to get home to the East Bay. Having completed triathlon number one yesterday resulting in some stomach unease (as apparently is common for endurance athletes) and having had my rest cut short by the ogre of Daylight Saving Time, I was ready to go home. This wasn't to be and as I made my way back up to ground level to return to the office for an hour, I ran into Armin (who cycled with Phil and I down to Los Angeles last summer) and so we went to get drinks.

Yesterday's (and my first) triathlon was also my first Treeathlon, having been organised by the Stanford Triathlon Club (Stanford has a tree as their mascot, so you know, Treeathlon, get it?).

Being woefully underprepared for the mechanics of a triathlon, I drove down on the Saturday immediately preceding the event to pick up my race packet. It's spring now in California, which means that the weather is gorgeous and about as good as anything you could expect on the very best days in London (if a little cooler). With the sunroof down, I drove the 2004 Sodhsmobile down to Redwood Shores, a private estate consisting of a number of office buildings and a marina (I can't imagine why they didn't have housing here too but perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough).

Having eventually found the volunteer run registration tent, I picked up a t-shirt (groaning at yet another branded t-shirt which I'll probably wear only while training for other triathlons) and a mysterious assortment of numbers (one small, one large, and one printed on paper with a paperclip attached to it) in a plastic bag (thankfully recyclable). With some trepidation I asked the volunteer, a friendly college aged woman, if I could ask her some stupid questions. I asked her what time I should arrive, how the transition area worked and what most people wore for the bike and run parts of the triathlon. Her answers were helpful but left several details unclear to me - but assuming some bravado was necessary, as a triathlete, I hoped that these questions would answer themselves the next day, at the event itself.

I ended up staying up a little too late that night, having procrastinated after dinner and having forgotten to swap the cyclocross tyres that were currently on my Ti bike for some nice slick road tyres. The clocks went forward though, which really hurt the next morning when I woke up after 6 hours sleep feeling non-trivially rough. Still, the adrenaline got me moving soon enough (along with a couple of Trader Joe's new Cookie Butter Cookies, the next best thing in meta).

My budget Chinese smartphone, the venerable OnePlus One (AKA but not really as the "two"), decided it wasn't ready to wake up and do useful things however, and after fiddling with it on the highway for a little too long to be considered a safe driver (thankfully the rest of the car driving population were sound asleep at home), I ended up getting lost in Fremont for at least 10 minutes. I eventually managed to get the navigation system working in the 2004 Sodhsmobile (it's one of those old school DVD based navigation systems that looks like what you might imagine the avionics displays of a 90s fighter jet might render as) at which point the OnePlus One (Two) decided to start being useful again and I had two navigation systems barking at me on my way to Redwood Shores.

The scene here was significantly busier than the day previous, making me thankful that I had registered earlier. The queues for both the registration and the porta-toilets were significant. After wandering back and forth a couple of times and observing the horde of excitable college students who were all competing (for what I think was the first race of the collegiate series), I asked a student who was near my car what to do with all the numbers in the recycleable plastic bag. I then took everything but my wetsuit over to the transition area.

Finding a place for my bike was difficult - people naturally spread out to fill the space that is available and I ended up asking someone if I could slide his bike over to fit mine in. Underneath your bike is a surprisingly generous amount of space to lay out your possessions for the transition (another thing that was impressive is how triathletes pre-attach their shoes to their bikes, the idea being that you put your shoes on while cycling!). I also needed to get body markings, a procedure where a volunteer with a pen writes several numbers on your arms, including your race number (#551 for me, although he got this wrong on the first arm) and your age (27, written on your left leg so that people know whether they need to overtake you or not to do well in their age group).

This accomplished, with my bike being in a safe place, I then decided to queue for the porta-toilet. The queue was still long though, and I had about 6 minutes to use the bathroom, run to my car, fetch my wetsuit and return to the transition area before they shut it. While putting my wetsuit on, I made conversation with a man in full TeamGB kit. Soon enough it was the whole "where are you from?", "England", "yah, but where in England?" conversation with him and his carbon fibre Specialized road bike painted in a colour scheme that I could only imagine was inspired by a Cadbury's Creme Egg.

A young kid (who must have been 16) and his mother were getting ready just next to us, TeamGB fellow helpfully zipped my wetsuit up for me and joked that it'd get a lot more comfortable once I peed in it. I did not pee in it but was now (oddly, given the expectation that it's all basically sewage anyway) perturbed by the idea of accidentally drinking triathlete urine while swimming. Having stashed the keys to my 2004 Sodhsmobile in the toe of my bike shoes, I walked over to the swim start point. Just in front of me was a man struggling with the last part of zipping his wetsuit, I offered to help and this sparked a conversation where I found out that this hero had managed to train for an Ironman triathlon while working a job at a venture capital and raising two little kids. Epic.

The energy levels (and, for me, a rather bilious nervousness) rose the closer we got to the start of the swim. The collegiate men's wave had yet to depart and were thrashing about in the water warming up. I wandered closer as a group of men who looked like they were all within the 18 to 34 years old group that I was part of crept closer to the edge of the water. The ramp was slippery, covered in damp green algae. The water lapping up the ramp was a murky brown in colour, a far cry from the almost sapphire blue coloured water I normally swim in, closer to the mouth of the Bay in Berkeley.

Once the first collegiate wave departed, I walked into the water, deliberately ignoring thoughts about its contents, and swam a couple of small laps. Looking down into the water through my goggles, it was a cloudy grey/brown colour. I lost track of the other nervous newbies I had met on the ramp so ended up lining to the left of the starting line, under the assumption that the lower density of people here would reduce the probability of me getting kicked in the face by another 18 to 34 year old.

With my watch ready to go in "Multisport" mode, and holding my arm above the water to prevent it losing satellite reception, I waited for the buzzer. Before long it was ten seconds left to go.

On the count of 4 I hit the start button and got ready to thrash.

It hit 0 and the water became choppy. I started swimming, but kept my head out of the water to avoid swimming into a fellow triathlete. I forgot how to breathe, at first. Soon, after turning around the first buoy (or booey, as Americans pronounce it), the field cleared up a little and I was able to swim and breathe more normally. After what felt like a short time (and was actually a short time, about 10 minutes), I saw what looked like the end. Sure enough, it was!

Climbing out on the slippery ladder up to the slightly rocky pontoon, I started the 0.75 kilometre run back to the transition area in my wetsuit. It was entertaining trying to slide my arms free out of the wetsuit after removing my goggles (in retrospect I should have kept the goggles on until after) and while still wearing my chunky watch. I'm sure I felt my left shoulder subluxate a little in the effort it took to pull my arm free from the wetsuit, but whatever.

It took me about 4.5 minutes to change out of my wetsuit and don a full cycling suit (lycra jersey, padded shorts and SPD shoes) which I'm quite proud of. I had a brief conversation with my 16 year old neighbour who, sadly, had apparently been kicked in the face by another swimmer and had lost his goggles as a result!

The bike section itself was pretty uneventful (and, I might add, somewhat boring), leading us up a road for 1.5 miles, back down the same road, and around the Redwood Shores estate itself. I saw a middle aged woman on a cruiser bike and thought it was excellent, although her facial expression was one of near terror.

I never understood the stereotype of triathletes being underwhelming cyclists but it was pretty amusing watching people try and overtake badly, particularly when using ridiculous aerobars (on a 12 mile bike ride, absurd).

The transition to a run was simpler still, taking me just a minute to put my bike away and change shoes. At this point I realised my thumb was bleeding although, a day later, I still haven't figured out where exactly the blood was coming from.

I'm not a great runner and by this point I was wishing hard that I had urinated earlier in the marina like the other triathletes. Still, I soldiered in the belief that 3 miles couldn't really be all that bad. The first thing I noticed (other than my full bladder) was that my back was kind of sore and wasn't at all happy about being subjected to the impact of foot after foot hitting the tarmac. I ignored it and kept going.

Later, TeamGB guy (who was in the 35+ wave, which started ten minutes after ours) overtook me. He yelled at me, "if you're going to wear a Cambridge jersey, you're going to have to run faster!". To which I replied, "but I was a cyclist at Cambridge".

Feeling my legs cramp up a little, I picked up some sort of isotonic drink from a volunteer next to the track but drinking while trying to run was the most awkward enactment and I'm sure most of it ended up on my Cambridge jersey.

With just under 2 miles to go, my watch helpfully vibrated an alert at me "Recovery time: good". I'm still not sure whether it told me that because I was going so slow it /assumed/ I was recovering or if it was telling me my pace was on track for a good recovery.

Having turned the final u-turn to get back to the finish line, I was overtaken by the collegiate athlete from Brown but trying to discern which university he represented was very difficult because he was wearing nothing but a pair of Speedo style swimming trunks, on which his university name was printed.

At some point ahead of me a Stanford athlete went through to great applause and cheering from her friends on the course. I came through to deathly silence afterwards but that, perhaps, is my fault for insisting that none of my friends come to spectate. Once I was through the silence I strolled through the finish line to be surrounded by over enthusiastic undergraduate triathletes and people making peanut butter sandwiches from a Costco supply of peanut butter and wholewheat bread.

Overall I came 78th out of 162 entrants in the men's age group (essentially all adult men). In my age group (25 to 29) I was 11th, coming 10th in the swim, 6th in the bike and 14th in the run. Onwards to Lake Berryessa in April!

One of the concepts I've been somewhat enamoured with lately is that of Pareto optimality. I first heard of the idea of Pareto optimality in my secondary school economics class and recently realised it makes a rather good aid to decision making - on the road, and elsewhere.

Pareto optimality (also known as Pareto efficiency) is a concept first referenced by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the 19th century. When an economy is in a state of Pareto optimality, it is in a state of allocation of resources where it is not possible to make someone better off without making someone else worse off. For instance, if there is a finite amount of electricity, in order for an electricity company to service an additional customer, they need to reduce what is supplied to other customers - i.e. for one person to be better off, the others are worse off.

Most resources are not in a Pareto optimal state in real life because our supply of resources is constantly growing. However, I think the idea of Pareto optimality actually translates to the behaviour of road traffic in most urban scenarios very neatly.

As an actor in the road system, there are a series of rules that govern how I must behave. These rules are necessary to prevent collision, to protect the safety of users of the road system and to ensure fair and orderly flow of traffic. Often collisions happen because expectations of the behaviour of other actors break. This can happens either due to lacking information (as commonly experienced in bicycle collisions where a driver cuts up a cyclist who they didn't see and thus were not expecting to be present) or because an actor behaves in a way that flouts expectations (for instance, a driver running a yellow light).

Of course, where these rules are commonly broken, the expectations of how actors behave change. These expectations, however, are still common amongst the majority of road users - allowing traffic to flow (albeit, often, at increased danger to participants). For instance, in India, is it given that traffic laws are disobeyed. However, for the most part, they appear to be uniformly disobeyed. Lane markings act as guidance more than any hard and fast rule of where your vehicle must travel, so drivers are accustomed to using their horn when a vehicle that is changing trajectory is at imminent risk of colliding with theirs. Equally, drivers listen for these beeps when driving. (There are many more examples of how the road system there actually manages to function without rules and with a billion participants...)

So how does Pareto optimality fit in with this system of rules on the road? Simply, given that a particular traffic situation within the road system is Pareto optimal, my actions as an actor may benefit me but will make another driver worse off. In the aggregate, this doesn't serve to benefit the world at large - and often the benefit to me is minimal.

Before I illustrate this with a few examples, it's worth considering when and when not a traffic situation is Pareto optimal. Pareto optimality is concerned with the allocation of resources - in the traffic sense, I like to think this is when the given capacity is fully allocated. For instance, let's consider my the last segment of commute, through San Francisco from the Powell Street BART station to work (a taxicab distance of 7 blocks).

In the mornings, there is heavy traffic and the first entire block of my trip, just south of Market, is often filled with standing traffic up to the intersection between Mission Street and 5th Street. In this situation, traffic almost behaves like a sliding block puzzle - for there to be space for your vehicle, another vehicle has to move out of the way. Similarly, an intersection can be considered full allocated when every pathway into that intersection is filled with traffic, pedestrian or vehicular.

This specific fully allocated road situation lends itself to my first example - that of running a light. It is clear that this situation is Pareto optimal - if I was to, as a driver or a cyclist, run a red light, it is very likely going to make someone else worse off at the benefit of saving me about a minute. Besides the obvious danger to crossing pedestrians, it will likely cause an entire row of traffic to (in the best case) wait a few seconds, and (in the worst case) have to brake to a halt, depending on the timing of the lights.

Any city cyclist will bemoan the irrationality of traffic lights, particularly when there is no traffic (this often happens to me when cycling past, say, 10pm in the evening). However, this situation is not Pareto optimal - there are plenty of spare resources, and it is possible to jump a red light without making any other road user worse off (albeit at some small risk to your own safety).

Another example where Pareto optimality becomes evident is lane shifting on a busy highway. In California, at least, traffic speed on the highway is fairly uniform - often the leftmost "fast lane" will be traveling only marginally quicker than the rightmost "slow lane". Slower traffic stays right and people move to a left lane to overtake. When there are three or more lanes, this system works reasonably well, and traffic is evenly distributed over the lanes. It breaks down, however, when there are just two lanes. This happens because the speed differential between the slow lane and the fast lane is significant - there are fewer lanes but drivers are still as slow and as fast as on any other highway.

Under heavy traffic, then, the left lane becomes a bottleneck for faster drivers. This results in a nuanced situation where the left lane is fully allocated and therefore Pareto optimal but the right lane is not, due to gaps in traffic. Any action affecting the left lane is likely to make actors worse off. A common action is where drivers in the left lane use the right lane for undertaking. They gain a few car positions and are slightly better off, but given a fully allocated lane, do not manage to increase their overall speed. On the other hand, this action forces an entire stream of cars to brake, thus making them worse off (increased fuel consumption and annoyance).

These two examples illustrate, hopefully, how Pareto optimality might be a useful decision making aid, particularly when commuting around town. When I'm driving or cycling around, it's nice to think about what effect my action will have on other people. If I rush through an intersection, is my gain (usually in time) worth the annoyance, discomfort and inefficiency forced upon other users? Equally, if I'm at a pedestrian crossing at night and there isn't a car in sight, no one is likely to be worse off if I jaywalk.

As for elsewhere, there are several situations where the concept of Pareto optimality has utility. I like to think the outcome of negotiations can often be improved by striving to push them to the Pareto optimality boundary. For instance, if a hypothetical startup is making a deal with a potential customer and the terms of the deal are not at the point where asking for more will make any party worse off (financially or in terms of goodwill), that deal is likely not optimal.

Of course, looking at another type of negotiation: that of a tenant and a landlord, that situation often is Pareto optimal and it's not possible to change the terms of the agreement. Changing the rent would very evidently make one party worse off and another better off.

Hopefully this makes sense and I haven't totally abused one of the fundamental principles of economics!

Three things restarted this week after a somewhat lengthy absence: 1) precipitation in the Bay Area; 2) me doing physical exercise; and 3) a blog post being published on GeekOnABicycle!

Last week, I finally succumbed and went to the doctor to seek medication for a most persistent chest infection that I've had for about a month. Normally I"m fairly against taking medication (not on any rationale basis, purely as a show of masochism) but this took long enough to clear that I finally got tired of the hacking cough and being unable to cycle up the hill to our apartment. While I'm fairly sure it's a matter of terminology - the doctor who I saw diagnosed me with walking pneumonia (which my doctor friend from the UK dismissed as basically just a chest infection). Still, it was amusing telling friends and relatives that it was pneumonia, "WHY AREN'T YOU IN BED RESTING?".

Going a bit further back in time to the second week of October, two notable things happened. The first was that the results of Escape from Alcatraz triathlon were announced. It, like the London Marathon (and probably like many other events that fellow masochists like to enter), is always oversubscribed to the point where a lottery is used to allocate entries from people who aren't ranked or rated or some other byword for being masochistic enough to have registered with an organising body.

Having entered unsuccessfully last year, I didn't fancy my chances. For some reason, however, this year I was lucky enough to be selected to pay the $400 (plus credit card charge) entry fee to enter the triathlon. My triathlon ambitions go back to the Tour D'Afrique, where just about every fellow EFIer had at some point run a marathon - and a not-insignificant subset of them had also completed Ironman distance triathlons. My reasoning at the time was, for the most part, they had a good 5-10 years on me. Roll around to 2014, 4 years later, and that excuse is starting to look a little feeble.

Still, a fractured kneecap very suddenly put my nascent running career to a halt for about a year and then the grad school applications started rolling out and then back in. Two years later, I'm no longer studying, and nor do I have any injuries that prevent a public commitment to this goal: on June 7th, 2015, I'll be attempting to finish the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon!

After dropping the $400 entry fee on the triathlon, reality began to sink in as my flatmate Erika asked repeatedly if I'd come up with a training plan yet. I still haven't, but decided to ameliorate the situation by signing up to Sports Club LA, an expensive gym-with-swimming-pool that at the time was regarded as second best only to the Equinox series of gyms in San Francisco and is conveniently close to work. (They have since bought Equinox, so now I feel even more like an over-privileged techie.)

Signing up just before the post-Christmas horde of 'guilty-of-over-indulging' San Franciscans yielded me a free month of membership. Little did Sunil of October know that fate would cruelly steal that month back through illness. I guess there's no such thing as a free lunch (except at the typical Bay Area tech company, where the investors pay).

Therefore, the second notable event was that I wasted money on a gym membership. Although to about 95% of people who've ever signed up for gym memberships, this probably isn't notable at all (I'm thinking of you, Aamod).

Anyway, the serious antibiotics I had last week (again, denounced as "overly defensive medical practice" by my doctor friend from the UK) seemed to do nothing at all for 3.5 days and then suddenly left me feeling human again at exactly 84 hours after washing the first pill down with a fine glass of Scotch (joking, I think, my memory of that night was a bit hazy).

While I've still got some latent asthma (thank you, recurring childhood afflictions), I felt well enough yesterday to go for a brief run while it was raining. Thankfully, however, the half hour on the treadmill was fairly dry as I looked out over the Californians panicking at the light drizzle.

Slowly, due to circumstances out of my control (actually, that's something of a lie), I've been instrumenting my life less and less. This is odd, being ostensibly a "data engineer" by background and ultimately having a great appreciation for spreadsheets and all things data. It started when I lost Fitbit no. 9 (I didn't buy 9, for what it's worth - they just have great customer service) at the beginning of my time in California. The Fitbit was a revealing gadget, in so much as I realised my daily calorie burn while commuting, sitting at my desk and commuting home was actually rather minimal. It didn't, however, give me the insights I was hoping for about my sleeping habits. I'm a notoriously poor sleeper, which, combined with my thyroid problems, makes my day to day productivity extremely variable.

Trying to work out how well I slept was a combination of the length of time I slept and how well I slept during that time. There are many variables and the Fitbit primarily captured the time I was "asleep" (although that functionality was enabled by you marking the start of your sleep and the end by pushing a button) and my activity during the night. However, the activity metric on its own wasn't directly actionable - knowing that I was much more restless one night than another only really helped if I knew why. Logging other data, like general activity during the preceding day (how much exercise), alcohol, caffeine and food consumption was helpful to validate that all the usual truths mostly hold true. However, what helped the most was controlling the ambient light in my room (in my case, this involved wearing an eye-mask) and controlling the ambient noise (by wearing ear plugs). Most of the time now, I sleep well enough - although it's hard to control the temperature and that seems to affect things.

I found then, that I didn't really miss the Fitbit once I'd lost the final one and decided not to replace it.

A few days before graduation I managed to smash my Nexus 4. Being about the poorest I've ever been in my life then, I replaced it with a Moto G, their budget smartphone. This has similar specifications to the Nexus 4 but a slower processor and half the RAM. At first, I didn't notice this limitation but it's quickly become painfully slow and now I'm holding my breath until the next Nexus phone. While I never was a huge Strava-er, I did enjoy documenting most of my life through photographs. However, the quality of the Moto G's photographs is fairly abysmal and the 30 second delay it takes to fire up the camera application means I've quickly fallen out of the habit of whipping my phone out.

Still, it functions as a messaging device. Our September work offsite to Clear Lake, a lake that is clear but *not* safe to swim in, was "off the grid". I had signal but decided to turn my phone off for the three day stretch regardless. This was extremely liberating but worried some of my friends who thought I had succumbed to a terrible bicycle accident, as I found out when I returned home to a torrent of messages. My parents (who I had told) were amused.

A couple of weeks ago my cycle computer broke. Yesterday, Alex, Armin and I rode the 100+ mile Levi's Gran Fondo, a ride north of San Francisco, starting and finishing in Santa Rosa. My phone battery was perilously close to empty, so I shut it down for the day. Aside from the maps at rest stops (which were, on average, about 15-20 miles apart), I just concentrated on the ride, not caring about my pace, elevation gain or much else, really, besides the growing ache in my legs and the world around me. This took me back to the bike trips Phil and I used to take over summer when we were 17, riding around the Hertfordshire countryside on our mountain bikes. As much of a cliche as it is, I can't help feeling that all this tech has taken something away from the experience of riding a bike. That said, I'm still somewhat competitive at heart and data makes it easier to figure out what you're doing (wrong or right); another gadget will almost certainly enter my life soon.